Estonia Supports Ensuring Rights of Children in Ukraine

02.01.2014

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is supporting a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) project to ensure the rights of children in Ukraine. The objective of the project is to aid children who have committed crimes with reintegrating into society and reuniting with their families. The project will be carried out in the years 2014-2016.

Foreign Minister Urmas Paet stressed that, in order to implement the project, it is necessary to develop various social welfare centres and services at the local level to ensure that the families of the most vulnerable children have comprehensive assistance. “Just recently, 11 special schools aimed at helping children who had committed crimes were active in Ukraine, but lately those schools have been closing down,” noted Paet. At the same time, the families often don’t want to take the children back because they don’t know how to raise them and point them in the right developmental direction. “For this purpose, we are supporting the activities of UNICEF in building up a network of social welfare centres that would enable children and their parents to be reunited,” declared the Estonian foreign minister.

The main partners in carrying out the project will be various Ukrainian ministries, the office of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, the children’s ombudsman, and various non-governmental organisations.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs will earmark 50,000 Euros to support the UNICEF project “Development of community-based services for children in conflict with the law and children with disability” in Ukraine. Estonia has previously supported other UNICEF activities in Ukraine as well.